Which USA State borders only one other USA state? Which USA State borders only one other USA state? By Cynthia Kirkeby Which USA State borders only one other USA state? Maine is the only state that has only one bordering, neighboring state. Cynthia Kirkeby Border State Civil War Secession Border States Slavery Map Delaware Border State Civil War History Delaware was a border slave state that unanimously voted to stay in the Union during the Civil War. Although Delaware is the second smallest state in the United States, its population was approximately 112,216 at the beginning of the war. Its size makes it a useful microcosm in understanding the divisiveness of the war. Factionalism, from abolitionism to secessionism, existed in Delaware, but many of its citizens did not align with either extreme. For example, there are three counties in Delaware. New Castle, which contains the city of Wilmington, was a center of trade, industry, and Republicanism. The two other counties, Kent and Sussex, were agricultural and generally pro-Southern. Thousands of men enlisted in the Union, but several hundred joined the Confederacy. Communities were divided, and Union troops had to patrol election polls to protect Republican voters.

After the colonial period,the agricultural economy of the state began to shift from tobacco to mixed farming, which created less need for slave labor. In 1860, there were 1,789 slaves in the state and 19,829 free African Americans. Many slaves ran away during the war, and some elected to serve the Union. In 1863, 954 African Americans joined the Union army, and handful of others served in the navy. However, many citizens of this state were not happy with the Emancipation Proclamation. In the 1864 election, they voted for George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate. After the war, Delaware Democrats rejected the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and worked to disenfranchise African Americans for several decades. Although Delaware was not a battlefield, the war did find its way into the First State. Fort Delaware became a prison for Confederate prisoners of war. The fortress was completed shortly before the war began and is located on Pea Patch Island.

The fort earned a reputation for cruelty and the moniker “Andersonville of the North.” However, the death rate in Fort Delaware, which supported a prison population of over 30,000, was only 7.6%. Most northern prisoners had a rate of twenty-one percent. See also: Sectionalism and Causes of the American Civil War . Union, Confederate, Civil War Border States Map Union, Confederate, Border State Civil War Strategy Map Kentucky Border State Civil War History The Bluegrass State claims as native sons and daughters many of the leading figures of the Civil War era, such as Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. One of Kentucky’s more prominent nineteenth century Senators, Henry Clay, spent much of his career trying to compromise the issue of slavery before the war. His most well known efforts were in crafting the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the later Compromise of 1850. As clear from these most prominent residents, Kentucky was a state of divided loyalties and families torn apart. The state provided 90,000 troops to the Union and 35,000 to the Confederacy.

Nowhere was this division more evident than in the "First Family." Several members of Mary Todd Lincoln's family fought for the South. Another family similarly divided was that of U.S. Senator John Crittenden, whose two sons were generals on opposite sides. Some historians even say that the ensuing family feuds, such as the Hatfields and the McCoys, carried on the war in Kentucky long after its official end. Civil War Border State Election Map Results Civil War Border States and President Election Map Results In 1861, Kentucky’s governor, Beriah Magoffin, favored secession, but the legislature voted to remain neutral. The major slaveholding areas in the Bluegrass Region and the western counties favored the Confederacy and sent many recruits to its army. Early in the war, however, the Union entered Kentucky. By the end of the Battle of Perryville in 1862, Confederate forces had retreated from the state. Although a rival secessionist government was formed, it had little power. For the remainder of the war, Kentucky was the target of Confederate raids by John Hunt Morgan, William Quantrill, Nathan Bedford Forrest and “Sue” Mundy.

These raiders destroyed supply lines, depots, public and private property. When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, it did not apply to Kentucky because it was a Border State. However, when he offered freedom to slaves who joined the Union army, numerous slaves fled to Camp Nelson, Kentucky, which became a recruitment center and major fugitive slave camp. Although the 13th amendment freed all slaves in 1865, the Kentucky General Assembly failed to ratify the 13th, 14th or 15th amendments to the Constitution (each need to be ratified by ï¿½ of the states). As a symbolic gesture, the amendments were officially ratified by the state on March 18, 1976. See also: Kentucky Civil War Border State: A History , States' Rights , and Civil War Border States History: HOMEPAGE . Missouri Border State Civil War History In 1820, Missouri gained national attention as the focus of the Missouri Compromise.

It was the northernmost slave state in the Mississippi River valley, and when its neighbor Kansas wanted to enter the Union in 1854 as a free state, trouble erupted along the border. Missouri Compromise of 1820: The admission of Missouri as a state in 1820 provoked a contentious national debate over slavery. Missouri was the second state to be carved from the vast territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase and was to be admitted as a slave state. This aroused concern in the North. After much wrangling, a compromise was worked out. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, Maine was admitted as a free state at the same time that Missouri came in as a slave state, maintaining the balance between slave and free states. Additionally, Congress prohibited slavery in all western territories lying above 36ï¿½ 30' latitude (the southern boundary of Missouri). Compromise of 1850: As a result of the Mexican War (1846-1848), the United States won vast acreage in the West (present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Texas). This acquisition renewed the controversy over slavery in the territories.

California applied for admission as a free state in 1850. Southern political leaders were concerned that this would upset the balance of 15 free and 15 slave states. They also were disturbed by northern agitation to end slavery in the District of Columbia and by the passage of "personal liberty" laws in the northern states. The personal liberty laws aimed to restrict the cooperation of state officials in enforcing the federal fugitive slave law. Southern senators blocked the admission of California and a crisis was at hand. Prolonged negotiation finally produced a series of measures that became known as the Compromise of 1850. Aspects of the compromise included 1) admission of California as a free state; 2) a stronger fugitive slave law; 3) assurance that Congress would not interfere with the interstate traffic in slaves in the South; and 4) prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Finally, an act allowed the citizens of the remaining territories to be carved out of former Mexican land to decide for themselves on allowing slavery. Optimists believed that these measures constituted a lasting settlement of the divisive issue of slavery, but this was not to be.

Kansas-Nebraska Act: In 1853-1854, the slavery issue got tied up with the effort to build a transcontinental railroad. In order to achieve territorial organization of land that a railroad to the West Coast might pass through, the Democratic Party had to make concessions to the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave the people of those territories the authority to decide on the legal status of slavery, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise line. This act kicked off seven years of intense national dispute over slavery, culminating in secession and, finally, civil war in 1861. Northerners were outraged at the Kansas-Nebraska Act's repeal of a long-established compromise. Pro- and anti-slavery factions immediately converted the territory of Kansas into a bloody battleground. Border Wars: The years of 1854-1861 were a turbulent time in Kansas territory. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 established the territorial boundaries of Kansas and Nebraska and opened the land to legal settlement. It allowed the residents of these territories to decide by popular vote whether their state would be free or slave.

This concept of self-determination was called "popular sovereignty." In Kansas, people on all sides of this controversial issue flooded the territory, trying to influence the vote in their favor. Rival territorial governments, election fraud, and squabbles over land claims all contributed to the violence of this era. United States in 1860 Map Border States, Free States, Slave States, and Territories Map Three distinct political groups occupied neighboring Kansas: pro-slavers, free-staters and abolitionists. Violence broke out immediately between these opposing factions and continued until January 29,1861, when Kansas entered the Union as a free state. This era became forever known in the state as "Bleeding Kansas." As Missourians tried to influence internal politics in Kansas, random violence became commonplace. Missouri guerrillas and Kansas jayhawkers raided and killed at will. A major event in during this time period was the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in 1857, which not only denied the slave Dred Scott and his wife their freedom, but went on to declare that African Americans per se were not citizens under the Constitution. Scott and his wife had filed their first petitions in the courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri.

The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 would legitimize the killing that had plagued Missouri for years. Union General Nathaniel Lyon, an ardent abolitionist, commanded all Union troops in the state. Former governor Sterling "Pap" Price became the commander of the pro-secession Missouri State Guard. The two sides met at Wilson's Creek in August of 1861. Lyon boldly attacked the Missouri State Guard that had been joined by a larger Confederate force, and even though he lost the battle and his life, he succeeded in keeping the state under Union control. Although Missouri remained under Union control for the rest of the war, as a Border State, it provided troops to both sides, pitting neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, and father against son. Guerrilla warfare reigned over the state for the remainder of the war, during which time William Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, and Frank and Jesse James began their infamous careers. A unified Confederate force was not seen in Missouri again until late 1864, when Sterling Price failed in a desperate attempt to regain control of the state. Legend has it that every general on both sides of the Civil War served at Jefferson Barracks at one time.

Among those who did are Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman. During the war, Jefferson Barracks had one of the largest Federal hospitals in the country, with over 3,000 beds, accommodating patients from battles as far away as Vicksburg. The Jefferson Barracks Historical Park exhibits photos, medical equipment, uniforms and weapons housed in buildings that were used during the Civil War. Among the Civil War veterans buried in the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery are 1,140 Confederates. See also: Missouri Civil War Border State: A History , Causes of the American Civil War , and Civil War Border States History: HOMEPAGE . Border State Reconstruction Map West Virginia Border State Civil War History The Mountain State entered the Union on June 20, 1863. Forming the western region of Virginia, West Virginia severed its ties from Virginia, and was only one of two states created during the Civil War (the other being Nevada). Not only did it incur revolutionary political changes, but it was the scene of several national events. The first shots of the impending war were fired on the night of October 16, 1859.

Abolitionist John Brown led an armed band of twenty-one men to Harpers Ferry, a strategic location on the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers near Washington, D.C. (known as Washington City at the time). Brown and his men captured the federal armory, arsenal, and Hall’s Rifle Works. His men held sixty citizens as hostages in hopes of persuading their slaves to join them, but no slaves came forward. President Buchanan sent the federal militia to put an end to the raid. The state of Virginia charged Brown with treason. Southerners condemned the raid, while militant abolitionists proclaimed him a martyr. Western Virginians were acutely aware of the divisiveness of the Civil War. When the Richmond Convention decided to secede from the Union in April 1861, northwestern delegates immediately returned to their home counties to drum up Union support before Virginians voted on the Ordinance. John S. Carlile, an influential politician and powerful orator, called for the formation of a new state at this First Wheeling Convention, but other delegates believed such an act was illegal, since this act required the permission of the older state.

When the Secession Ordinance was approved in May, a Second Wheeling Convention was called. The delegates formed the Reorganized Government of Virginia based in Wheeling. They elected a new Virginia governor (Francis Pierpont) and appointed new Virginia Senators (John Carlile and Arthur Boreman). Delegates were divided and argued throughout the whole process, debating the state’s size and the issue of slavery. Carlile was asked to draft a report on West Virginia statehood. As a conservative dismayed with the radical Congress, he tried to sabotage the bill. Boreman managed to save it with the addition of the Willey Amendment, which provided for emancipation. The bill was approved by Congress, but President Lincoln questioned the legality before he finally signed the bill December 31, 1862. It went back to the voters, who approved the amended bill. West Virginia became the 35th state on June 20, 1863. Present-day US Census Bureau Border States Map Present-day Census Bureau Border State Map The Union Army facilitated these revolutionary political changes when it achieved control of northwestern Virginia early in the war.

The army was able to retain control through engagements in Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Carnifex Ferry. In 1862, Clarksburg native Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson swept through on his Shenandoah Valley campaign, resulting in skirmishes in the Eastern Panhandle. Despite general Union control, this did not mean West Virginians were safe from confederate raiders. Guerrilla warfare persisted after 1863 until the end of the war, including the Jones-Imboden Raid, Battle of Droop Mountain, and raids by McNeill’s Rangers of Hardy County. For many years it was thought that West Virginians produced significantly more Union soldiers than Confederates, but recent scholarship indicates that the numbers are about 20,000 for each side. The divisiveness of this period continued long after the war ended. See also: West Virginia Civil War Border State: A History , Secession, Border States, and Civil War , and Civil War Border States History: HOMEPAGE .

(Sources and related reading below.) Site search The Great American Menu: Foods Of The States, Ranked And Mapped The Great American Menu: Foods Of The States, Ranked And Mapped Go to permalink What are the United States' best regional foodstuffs? Its worst? These are the questions that bedevil the mind of man—but no longer! For here, we have ranked them. Rigorously scientific (not), ardently researched (nope), and scrupulously fair (not even a little bit): this is the Great American Menu! Advertisement Each state (plus the District of Columbia) gets one, and only one, signature foodstuff. And we selected actual food preparations; no state gets credit merely for being the geographic location where a certain edible flora or fauna happens to grow or swim or graze. But enough of that bullshit. On to the rankings! (For a full-size version of Jim Cooke's map, click here .) The Greats 1. Chicago-style deep-dish pizza (Illinois) Man is mortal. He frolics upon the grass of life for but a short season, and then is snatched back to the inanimate dirt of his origin.

The Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, America's greatest regional foodstuff—all those toppings, good God so much cheese and meat, I can hear my heartbeat, this can't be right, it sounds like a goddamn chainsaw, can that be right?—will greatly hasten that day's arrival, but it will also fill at least a little part of at least one of those days with a transcendent, mind-boggling, outrageously indulgent sensory experience. This is the best thing any food can do, and certainly far beyond the capabilities of [stares daggers at New York] a sheet of soggy cardboard with a flap of waxy melted cheese stretched across it. 2. Shrimp and grits (South Carolina) Shrimp. Grits. Tasty, satisfying, authentically South Carolinian. Perfect. 3. Mission-style burrito (California) The Mission-style burrito is especially great because, nowadays, you don't have to go all the way to California to get a good one.

In fact, you can even leave California at 125 miles per hour, screaming and crying because your organ systems are rightly rejecting the state of California like a grafted-on walrus tail because California is awful, and still get a tasty Mission-style burrito pretty much wherever you end up! This is because a Mission-style burrito is just a really fuggin' large burrito with extra rice and (figurative) shit in it. Mmmmmmmm. 4. Crab cake (Maryland) As we've established ( here , here , and here ), blue crab—particularly the Chesapeake blue crab—is the best of all ingestibles. However, the Maryland crab cake ranks fourth on this list, simply because so many of the various foodstuffs calling themselves crab cakes are really just mildly crab-flavored bread wads for ninnies, which are nonetheless priced as though they contain some quantity of actual by-God crabmeat measurable in units larger than the zeptogram.

This means that the best way to obtain a genuine crabcake, rather than an OldBayseasoningandcrushedcrackerscake, is to make one at home—and, so long as you can find yourself a tub of crabmeat to work with, you don't have to be anywhere near Maryland to do that. (That's a good thing. Maryland drivers. Holy shit.) Somewhere along the way, lobster became the symbol of gustatory luxury. You picture your… Read more Read more 5. Peach pie/cobbler (Georgia) Peaches are good. Pie crust and/or biscuit dough are/is good. Good on ya, Georgia. 6. Gumbo (Louisiana) Yeah, yeah, Louisiana also has the po' boy and the beignet, but really, those are New Orleans foods, and New Orleans already thinks more than highly enough of itself. Besides, neither of those is as tasty as Creole gumbo, which, factually, is the sole credible argument for not sinking that state into the Gulf of Mexico. 7. Key lime pie (Florida) But what about the Cuban sandwich?!?!?!?!

First of all, there's some controversy about the Cuban sandwich's origins: Either it is from Cuba, in which case it is Cuba's sandwich and not Florida's, or it is from Tampa, in which case it is not a Cuban sandwich and has a dumb name, in which case it sucks because things from Tampa suck because Tampa sucks. In any case it is not as definitively Floridian as Key lime pie, which originated in Florida and is made with ingredients—Key limes—that are native to Florida and nowhere else. (It also doesn't taste as good as Key lime pie. So there.) Anyway Key lime pie is very good and I don't know how we wound up talking about the Cuban sandwich this whole time so let's just move on. 8. Fried green tomatoes (Alabama) ... at the Whistle Stop Cafe, yawl! There is nothing to say about fried green tomatoes. They taste very good and you should eat some. The Goods 9. Stacked enchilada with green chile (New Mexico) This is really, really fucking tasty. It loses some nonexistent points, though, for the notion that you can just leave the tortillas unrolled and pretend you've created a new foodstuff.

That's horseshit, New Mexico. Horse. Shit. 10. Marionberry pie (Oregon) Mmmmmmm, pie. Oh man. Nobody tell any Oregonians how high their state food is ranked, though. They can't fit any more self-congratulation into their busy schedules. 11. Hot wieners (Rhode Island) I'm not gonna lie here. The name is a big reason Rhode Island's signature food is ranked so high. It's a tasty hot dog, too. 12. Burgoo (Kentucky) Kentucky's signature food, a whatever-you-got stew that never tastes the same twice, gets a million imaginary bonus points for its wonderful communal nature: People just bring whatever ingredients they can, and everybody puts what they've got into the stew, and out comes burgoo, and that is just fucking beautiful, even though in reality probably 78 percent of its ingredients were scraped off I-64 with a snow shovel. 13. Pulled pork barbecue (North Carolina) Pulled pork is more reliably tasty than burgoo—that is to say, there's virtually zero chance of it containing a fistful of raccoon fur—but a lot less wonderful. Science.

14. New England clam chowder (Massachusetts) Demerits for New England. T-15. Kansas City-style ribs (Missouri) T-15. Memphis-style ribs (Tennessee) For real, they're the same shit. But hey, let's fight about it! 17. West Virginia slaw dog (West Virginia) This is a hot dog with a chili-like meat sauce, mustard, and coleslaw on it. (Sometimes it has chopped onions on it, too.) Which, yeah, you can get variations of that pretty much anywhere, but West Virginians are serious about the coleslaw part. It's tasty. Like so much else in its home state, it is also low-grade, disreputable, and makes you feel kinda sad and gross if you think about it for too long. 18. Chimichanga (Arizona) Somebody dropped a burrito into a deep-fryer and out came Arizona's signature food, which no one in Arizona eats, because half the people in Arizona are too old for solid foods, and the rest are on the run from white-supremacist paramilitary border militias. 19.

Frozen custard (Delaware) Suggested advertising language for your frozen custard shop: Frozen custard! It's just like ice cream, only not particularly significantly unlike it, and only preferable if you grew up with it! Bonus points for the fact that ice cream is yummy; demerits for just being ice cream with some egg in it. 20. Texas-style barbecue brisket (Texas) Beyond the smoky tastiness of all barbecue, the virtues of the Texas-style barbecue brisket are as follows: It is very large. The end. 21. Fried okra (Oklahoma) They both start with O-K, and they are both never better than that. 22. New York-style pizza (New York) By rough estimate, there are 900 trillion pizza joints per person in New York City. Somehow, within this competitive environment, not a one of the purveyors of "New York Pizza" has yet considered the wild and crazy idea of maybe trying to do something—anything!—interesting with its pizza.

Here is a comically large, thin wedge of dough with some indifferent, rubbery cheese smeared across it, and maybe a few greasy F-grade variants of the same bullshit toppings you can get on your lousy DiGiorno back in friggin' Topeka. Oooh, it's so New Yorky! In that it is overpriced and happy to coast along on a long-since-hollowed-out myth of Big Apple authenticity, just like everything else in this giant, bad-smelling amusement park for rich white people! New York pizza isn't even a genuine pizza genre. It's just lousy, half-assed pizza. Papa John's with a chip on its shoulder. 23. Hot Hawaiian breakfast (Hawaii) This is Spam, eggs, and rice. Tastes like authentic cargo cult! 24. Lobster roll (Maine) Here is a list of accoutrements cooked lobster meat does not need: Advertisement Only Maine could turn lobster into a goddamn hot dog. 25. Bull testicles (Montana) Oddly, bull testicles come in so low on the list not because of ew, cow nads!!1!

(seriously, the weirdest thing about eating bull testicles is the bizarre interspecies gay panic—"I don't put no balls in this-a-here mouth!"—they arouse in the food-scared weenie population), but because, eh, they're just not all that exciting. What else you got, Montana? Come back with, like, eyeball pie or something. Cow-snot poppers. Braised asshole. Something really challenging. Welcome to Jeb's Montana Steakhouse! Try the heifer surprise: She gives birth right into your open mouth! 26. Fried catfish (Arkansas) Fried catfish is pretty tasty, which is no small triumph, since catfish are pretty fuggin' grody. Still: Would you order the fried catfish off the Great American Menu? No. You would not. It would sit there on the menu forever, and you'd pass it over a million times—sometimes even in favor of certainly less pleasant-tasting but more adventurous stuff—and then you'd hear somebody at an adjacent table order it, and you'd go, "Oh, they have fried catfish here? Huh. I never noticed.

Maybe I'll try that next time." And then you'd go right back to forgetting it existed, just like you do with Arkansas. 27. Maple syrup (Vermont) Maple syrup is plenty tasty, but, c'mon. It's tree-snot reduction. Try harder, Vermont. 28. Scrapple (Pennsylvania) But the cheesesteak mer m'mer Phiwwy cheesesteak mer! Shut it. The famous grease-and-garbage sandwich belongs to the city of Philadelphia, which A) is the worst place on Earth, and B) doesn't come close to representing the entire state of Pennsylvania. In a given day, 500 times as many Pennsylvanians are scraping possums off the motorway to add volume to their scrapple as are standing in line with the tourists in the Junior Varsity Metropolis to have a bucket of Cheez Whiz dumped onto a fistful of thinly sliced sewer rat. Your state food is this salty, greasy, gray, abjectly horrifying pig-rectum-mash, and, fuck you, it is delicious.

Advertisement Sponsored (Also, a 9-year-old in her parents' kitchen could make a tastier cheesesteak in 10 minutes than any to be found in Philadelphia. Thhhppbbpbpbppbbp.) 29. Corndog (Iowa) Who doesn't love a corndog? Nobody, that's who, and also idiots. On the other hand, when a region's entire concept of cuisine is to take ordinary foodstuffs (hot dogs, brownies, fucking honey ), dunk them in batter, mount them on a stick, and deep-fry them, the successes (corndogs) tend to be shadowed somewhat by the excesses (deep-fried Snickers bars), the horrors (chocolate-covered deep-fried cheesecake), the oh-fuck-this-has-to-be-some-kind-of-goofy-Iowa-troll-job jobs (fucking deep-fried honey), and the lingering suspicion that Midwesterners suffer from a congenital lack of tastebuds. 30. Cedar-plank salmon (Washington) I mean, it's salmon. Whoop-de-fuckin'-do. I like mine with extra board. 31.

Cowboy cookies (Colorado) The cowboy cookie is a chocolate-chip cookie to which someone wisely added rolled oats and shredded coconut, and to which someone else very stupidly added chopped pecans even though pecans are shitty. Neither pecans nor coconuts nor oats come from Colorado. Nor does chocolate. Nor do cowboys, really. You know what does come from Colorado? Confused looks and shrugged shoulders when you ask people what their state's signature foodstuff is. This is because, at any given time, 102 percent of the people in Colorado are vacationing Californians in bubble-vests and hiking boots. Real Colorado-types (Coloradans? Coloroadies? Colorectal cancers?) eat snow, and don't exist. 32. Mud pie (Mississippi) This is essentially a pile of brownie dough floating in a gallon of chocolate syrup. It is delicious. Let's take this moment to remember that Mississippi leads the nation in adult diabetes. 33. Bratwurst (Wisconsin) The bratwurst is among the more boring and dumb tube meats, even before you penalize it for being a pillar of the beers, brats, and bros!

triad of meathead tailgating culture. The authentic-replica-Bryan-Bulaga-jersey set like bratwurst because they're less interested in tasty food than in a large meat comma they can use to divide alcohol-abuse clauses. Be honest: Would you rather have another boring bratwurst, or a hot Italian sausage with sautéed peppers and onions? Or a grilled kielbasa with a pickle spear, sauerkraut, and grainy mustard? Exactly. Shut up. 34. Virginia ham (Virginia) Truthfully, nobody in Virginia gives a shit about Virginia ham, which is just another friggin' ham, only with 900 times as much salt as all the other hams, which are already pretty fuggin' salty. It's not like Virginia is any hammier than any other state, really. In fact, it's probably less into ham than most of its Southern brethren. The favorite foodstuff of Northern Virginia is the gluten-free white-soy-chocolate-macadamia-nut biscotti at every insufferable chain coffee joint in the world; in southern Virginia, the most popular thing to cook, by far, is a large wooden cross.

The Better-Than-A-Finger-In-The-Eyes 35. Fried pork tenderloin sandwich (Indiana) This is a crispy chicken sandwich, only with a big, chewy sheaf of salty pig in place of the juicy, marinated chicken breast. It is neither particularly interesting nor particularly original. It is the signature food of Indiana, which, of course it is. 36. Half-smoke (District of Columbia) For those not familiar with the culture of our nation's capital, the half-smoke is a hot dog. Yes, it is. Sometimes it can be half beef and half pork; sometimes it can be smoked. Most often it is a steamed beef frank with some very lousy chili slopped over it. Always it is a hot dog. Never is it anything special. Yoda this paragraph wrote. 37. Chicken-fried steak (Wyoming) Because, y'know, when you're having a steak, you definitely need some heavy breading and thick, greasy gravy to make sure you don't come away with an empty stomach. 38.

Finger steaks (Idaho) "For starters, we'd like the deep-fried steak poppers, please, and a pair of defibrillator paddles." 39. Hamburger casserole (Kansas) The hamburger that you serve with a fucking ladle. Christ. 40. Hotdish (Minnesota) This is basically the same thing as Kansas's hamburger casserole—some meat, some starch, some mushy overcooked vegetables, and some canned soup, dumped into a deep pan and baked for a while—only with a name that makes it sound like Rod Stewart should be humping its leg in a London disco in 1974. 41. Michigan pasty (Michigan) Michigan's signature foodstuff—meat and potatoes served in a portable bread-purse—goes by the name pasty as a means of associating itself with the pasty of England, as though the culinary traditions of that pallid, inbred, rain-soaked island shithole will vindicate what is essentially a calzone for people who hate and fear things that are good. 42. Chislic (South Dakota) Picture a kebab . Can you picture a kebab?

Meat, veggies, skewer, maybe some cucumber dressing and tasty pita bread or naan on the side? Fresh and flavorful and varied and exciting? Got it? OK. Now, eradicate that appetizing image from your mind, and replace it with a bunch of small cubes of greasy, chewy beef on toothpicks, sitting on a sad plate next to some plastic-wrapped packets of saltines. Congratulations. You have now pictured chislic, as well as everything you need to know about the culture of the upper Midwest. 43. Green Jell-O with goddamn carrots in it (Utah) Come on, Mormons. Goddammit. 44. Lutefisk (North Dakota) Lutefisk (Norwegian for "lye-fish") is a traditional Nordic preparation whereby dried whitefish is soaked in fucking oven cleaner for no goddamn reason for a long time until it is no longer dry, salty, and disgusting, but gelatinous and pungent and five trillion times as disgusting. There is no reason to eat it ever. There is no reason for it to exist. What the fuck is wrong with Nordic people. 45.

Salt water taffy (New Jersey) New Jersey's signature foodstuff is, quite literally , the result of a sarcastic asshole offering flood-damaged candy to a small child. It is chewy misery to consume, tastes terrible, and contains virtually nothing that any intellectually honest use of the language would permit to be described as food. Salt water taffy is an unhappy accident consecrated to history by the Garden State's lack of literally anything else to claim as its own. 46. Handheld meat pies (Nebraska) These are homemade Hot Pockets. They are homemade Hot Pockets, and they are what pass for regional culture in Nebraska, the other other other corn state. 47. Akutaq (Alaska) Say this for akutaq, Alaska's putrid mixture of whipped fat (usually vegetable shortening; traditionally blubber) and berries: What it lacks in, um, not being fucking disgusting, it more than makes up for in the rich lipids and antioxidants the hardy people of the Last Frontier need to get through their pitch-dark "days" of drilling for oil, hunting kidnapped prostitutes across the tundra, and starving to death in abandoned buses. 48.

Boiled dinner (New Hampshire) This is pretty much what it sounds like: You put a big wad of meat and some bland tuberous growths into a pot, cover them with water, clamp on a lid, and then parade around smugly barking about the importance of your dipshit state's presidential primary until the water has successfully annihilated any traces of flavor or character from your food, so that it can more closely resemble the people who will be eating it. 49. Not having any authentic local culture to speak of (Nevada) Sorry, but "one's retirement savings" does not count as a foodstuff. 50. A fucking steamed fucking cheeseburger (Connecticut) No foodstuff could more quintessentially embody Connecticut's rigorous commitment to blandness than a mushy wad of pulverized cow cooked in water vapor. You don't need a degree in American history to conjure up the almost certainly accurate image of some buckle-hatted Puritan twerp's Eureka!

moment, when he discovered a cheeseburger preparation that promised all of the Caloryes of a Common Cheese-and-Burger, but None of the Curfed Pleafure, which Verily rots the fpirit and faps the Vigour of Man. Being Hit By A Car 51. Being hit by a car Ohio 52. Cincinnati chili (Ohio) For the mercifully unacquainted, "Cincinnati chili," the worst regional foodstuff in America or anywhere else, is a horrifying diarrhea sludge (most commonly encountered in the guise of the "Skyline" brand) that Ohioans slop across plain spaghetti noodles and hot dogs as a way to make the rest of us feel grateful that our own shit-eating is (mostly) figurative.

The only thing "chili" about it is the shiver that goes down your spine when you watch Ohio sports fans shoveling it into their maws on television and are forced to reckon with the cold reality that, for as desperately as you might cling to faltering notions of community and universality, ultimately your fellow human beings are as foreign and unknowable to you as the surface of Pluto, and you are alone and always have been and will die alone, a world unto yourself unmarked and unmapped and totally, hopelessly isolated. Advertisement Advertisement But wait! This abominable garbage-gravy isn't just sensorily and spiritually disgusting—it's culturally grotesque, too! What began as an ethnic curio born of immigrant make-do—a Greek-owned chili parlor that took its "Skyline" name from its view of the city of Cincinnati—is now a hulking private-equity-owned corporate monolith that gins up interest in its unmistakably abhorrent product by engineering phony groups of "chili fanatics" to camp out in advance of the opening of new chains, in locations whose residents would otherwise see this shit-broth for what it is and take up torches and truncheons to drive it back into the wilderness.

Whatever virtue this bad-tasting Z-grade atrocity once contained derived from its exemplification of a set of certain cherished American fables—immigrant ingenuity, the cultural melting pot, old things combining into new things—and has now been totally swamped and consumed by different and infinitely uglier American realities: the commodification of culture; the transmutation of authentic artifacts of human life into hollow corporate brand divisions; the willingness of Americans to slop any horrible goddamn thing into their fucking mouths if it claims to contain some byproduct of a cow and comes buried beneath a pyramid of shredded, waxy, safety-cone-orange "cheese." Cincinnati chili is the worst, saddest, most depressing goddamn thing in the world. If it came out of the end of your digestive system, you would turn the color of chalk and call an ambulance, but at least it'd make some sense. The people of Ohio see nothing wrong with inserting it into their mouths, which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about the Buckeye State. Don't eat it. Don't let your loved ones eat it. Turn away from the darkness, and toward the deep-dish pizza.

How To Barbecue Chicken Thighs: A Guide For People Who Aren't Assholes How To Barbecue Chicken Thighs: A Guide For People Who Aren't Assholes How To Barbecue Chicken Thighs: A Guide For… So it's Labor Day weekend, the holiday that offers up togetherness and honoring American labor … Read more Read more Albert Burneko is an eating enthusiast and father of two. His work can be found destroying everything of value in his crumbling home. Peevishly correct his foolishness at albertburneko@gmail.com , or publicly and succinctly on Twitter @albertburneko . You can find lots more Foodspin at foodspin.deadspin.com . Advertisement

Question: Which American state has a border with only one other state?
Answer: MAINE